The Jays need more than upside from Yusei Kikuchi. The downside is starting to hurt
Kikuchi #Kikuchi
With rumblings that Hyun-Jin Ryu is expected to miss significant time because of a chronic issue in his left elbow, the Blue Jays are going to need their starters — particularly those at the back end of the rotation — to step up and fill the void.
Ryu is scheduled to be examined Thursday in the Los Angeles area for a second medical opinion on what has been described as left forearm inflammation. He isn’t expected back any time soon, but whether his injury drags on weeks, months or even into next year remains unknown.
The Jays have lofty expectations for Alek Manoah, Kevin Gausman and José Berríos as their top three starters. It’s the two guys below that group — Ross Stripling and Yusei Kikuchi — who bring a lot more uncertainty. They don’t need to be perfect. They just need to be reliable, and that certainly didn’t happen in an 8-4 loss to the Royals in Kansas City on Wednesday afternoon.
Two days after Stripling made a statement with five scoreless innings in the series opener, Kikuchi failed to make one of his own. The 30-year-old wasn’t just bad, he was downright awful, failing to make it out of the first inning against one of the worst lineups in baseball. To make matters worse, almost all the damage was self-inflicted.
From the moment Kikuchi stepped onto the mound at Kauffman Stadium, it appeared he had no idea where the ball was going. He wasn’t just missing catcher Zack Collins’s glove by an inch or two, he was missing by a couple of feet. Of the 45 pitches he threw to retire just two batters, only 24 were strikes.
The final pitching line said it all. Kikuchi was charged with three runs on a pair of hits and four walks. It was the shortest outing of his big-league career, and the only reason he didn’t get charged with more runs is because reliever Trent Thornton entered and bailed him out of a bases-loaded jam. The brief appearance elevated Kikuchi’s ERA from 3.91 to 4.44.
Much has been made of the adjustments that Kikuchi has been making with pitching coach Pete Walker. The biggest change was ditching his cut-fastball in favour of a modified slider, while other minor tweaks were made to his mechanics and where the native of Japan stands on the rubber.
Initially, the changes met with great success. Kikuchi held opponents to two earned runs or fewer across five May starts. He struck out more than a batter per inning and there were flashes of dominance, with a mid-90s fastball and devastating changeup/splitter. The upside was apparent. But even when things were going well, so too was the downside.
In a recent start against the Cincinnati Reds, Kikuchi walked three batters and hit another while surrendering a pair of runs in the first inning. He escaped and made it into the fifth without any more damage, but he was a pitch or two away from an outing that would have been just as short as Thursday’s. Last week against the Los Angeles Angels, he gave up a pair of hits in each of the first two innings before settling in. Kikuchi’s 1.48 walks plus hits per inning pitched are the highest in the rotation.
The lack of consistency must be infuriating to the coaching staff, which has been preaching to Kikuchi to trust his fastball more by using it to challenge hitters, instead of nibbling around the corners. It’s something the Seattle Mariners can relate to because they experienced it for three years before he arrived in Toronto.
The tweaks that Kikuchi has made this season aren’t new; they’re just different. The Mariners went through this a lot and saw equally confusing results, as evidenced last season with a 3.18 ERA on July 7 that ballooned to 6.22 in the second half.
“When Yusei came to us, it was more fastball-curveball when he originally started,” manager Scott Servais said when the Mariners were in town last month. “Then he reinvented himself and we saw the velocity jump up with the hard cutter. He still has the really good fastball; you’ll see it 95, 96 … His stuff is different now than when he first came to us from Japan.”
Kikuchi has been relatively effective for the Jays, but his unpredictability brings back memories of knuckleballer R.A. Dickey. The only thing missing is a trick pitch. Dickey was more effective than most people gave him credit for with a 4.05 ERA across three seasons with the Jays, but he occasionally fell apart in spectacular fashion.
The periodic no-shows from Dickey meant he never really gained the trust of former manager John Gibbons, because the Jays never knew which version of the former Cy Young Award winner they were going to get. That’s why David Price came out of the bullpen in Game 4 of the 2015 AL Division Series against the Texas Rangers despite a six-run lead. The following year, Dickey didn’t throw a single pitch in the post-season.
If Kikuchi wants to avoid a similar fate, he’ll need to find more consistency.
It’s OK to have a bad start, but it’s much less acceptable for the outing to be so awful that the bullpen gets decimated while trying to pick up the slack.
Kikuchi failed to complete five innings in all but three of last year’s final eight starts with the Mariners. He’s failed to do the same in three of his last four with the Jays. The momentum gained from early-season tweaks has subsided, and it looks like some additional ones will have to be implemented soon.
Kikuchi has plenty of upside, there’s no debating that. It’s his reliability that has come into question. The six-foot lefty remains a work in progress, which shouldn’t come as a shock because he has been one for the last four years.
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